Landon Stobaugh

Junior Landon Stobaugh missed the first week of school not because of a beach vacation, but because he was studying Japanese in Vermont. Stobaugh, who has been teaching himself Japanese for the past year and a half, decided to attend an immersion language program.

“I spent eight weeks in Vermont at the Middlebury [University] Japanese language program,” Stobaugh said. “At that program, I was not allowed to speak English the whole time. I used only Japanese for eight weeks.”

Japanese isn’t Stobaugh’s only self-taught skill. In middle school, Stobaugh decided to teach himself how to code.

“It was the first year of middle school where I got serious into [programming],” Stobaugh said. “I got a book, and it was a book about C++. I started reading that C++ book, and it made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. But I read it over like, five, six times and eventually it clicked.”

Following his passion, he began to invest more time into coding after attending a programming camp.

“I found that I really liked computer science, and engineering in general,” Stobaugh said. “It made me want to keep on diving deeper and deeper into subjects like computer security, AI, robotics and a lot of other subtopics.”

With endless open-source projects at his fingertips, Stobaugh had no shortage of practice. In his free time, he would download older video games and try to find exploits in its code to hack the game. This experience sparked Stobaugh’s interest in cybersecurity and white hat, or ethical security hacking, which are areas he currently focuses on.